Context matters. It is unacceptable to use racial slurs as pejoratives. It is also unacceptable to construct a taboo that would forbid the printing or utterance of racial slurs even when, as is in this article, the context is the racial slur as a word itself, not as a pejorative.
Word taboos that disregard context are a first step on a slippery slope to the squelching of thoughts and opinions.
John M. O’Connor
To the Editor:
The Times is to be commended for running Prof. John McWhorter’s detailed and well-documented article about the history and use of the N-word because it sets that word meaningfully apart from odious terms referring to other groups because of their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, birthplace, etc.
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April 30, 2021
By John McWhorter
Dr. McWhorter is a linguist who has written extensively about both race and language. He is the author, most recently, of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter,” from which this guest essay is adapted.
This article contains obscenities and racial slurs, fully spelled out. Ezekiel Kweku, the Opinion politics editor, and Kathleen Kingsbury, the Opinion editor, wrote about how and why we came to the decision to publish these words in
.
In 1934, Allen Walker Read, an etymologist and lexicographer, laid out the history of the word that, then, had “the deepest stigma of any in the language.” In the entire article, in line with the strength of the taboo he was referring to, he never actually wrote the word itself. The obscenity to which he referred, “fuck,” though not used in polite company (or, typically, in this newspaper), is no longer verboten. These days, there are two other words that an American writer would treat as Mr. Read did.
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